Responding to CRPUSD Tickets

Context

We’re tracking KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to help the district and the company gauge the quality of the support response to district issues as part of an initiative to improve our responsiveness and their understanding of the reliability of our support. The KPIs are reported weekly and consist of the following metrics:

Median First Response Time

Median Time to Ticket Closure

Number Open Tickets

Number Pending Tickets

Number of Closed Tickets

Total Support Requests Processed by Staff

To ensure we keep good handle on all of these numbers we all need to follow some shared best-practices in handling district support tickets.

PLEASE NOTE: All these procedures refer to support tickets only. In the case of non-support items (scheduling meetings, discussing project deadlines, blasts email notifications to people at the district, etc) simply set the assignee to Anna to review.

Respond Early & Often

Please reply to District Tickets immediately to notify the requester that their issue is received and understood - answer to their question is not required for the first reply

Whenever a district tickets arrives - either as a chat or email - the first person to process the request should reply to the ticket immediately. It’s ok if you do not know the answer nor plan to handle the ticket yourself. Just let the requestor know that their question has been received and processed by someone. If you’re reassigning the ticket, feel free to let them know that as well.

One way to consider structuring your reply might be:

Address the requestor by name

Thank them for their question

Let them know we got it and are working on it OR Give an answer/explanation if you know the issue

Ask for screenshots if you know that issue is very unclear

Give them suggestions or links to blog posts if you can send them any resources

Sign the email with your name

Some sample replies might be along the lines of:

Working on Issue Submitted via Email - “Thanks ______ for contacting us! I just wanted to assure you that we’re working on your question and will update you as soon as we have an answer. In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to let us know”

Reassigning Issue Submitted via Email - “Hi _____ - Thanks for your email - great question. I wanted to let you know that I’m passing this along to our district core team to respond since I know they’ll be able to work with you to get everything resolved. Of course, though, if you have any questions for me or need any help in the meantime, do feel free to contact us any time!”

Continuing Work on Issue Submitted Via Chat - “Hi ____ - Hope all is well for you! Thanks again for dropping by chat earlier today. I wanted to make sure you knew that we’ve got your question about ______ in our issue tracking system and are still looking into it. We’ll be in touch soon with an update and any ideas or questions we may have had come up while investigating this question. That said, if you have any questions or concerns come up in the meantime, feel free to let us know any time. Thanks again!”

HOWEVER: In the case of Non-Support Issues (scheduling meetings, discussing project deadlines, feature requests, etc) - please do not respond to these. Simply set the Assignee to Anna.

If you have any questions on how to respond to tickets, please do ask on HipChat (any room is fine) rather than letting the ticket sit in the stack.

Assigning Tickets

Although we’re tracking District tickets specially, the way they’re processed works pretty much the same as any other ticket. There’s only one key step to make sure the district tickets show up in the metrics: assigning the requester’s Organization in Zendesk. The most common requester’s profiles are already set up. However, in the event you see a request from a new user or a returning user using a different name/username, you may need to set this again or merge two users together. Once you have handled the Requester’s Organization, filling in the ticket’s fields works the exact same.

Setting Requester Organization

In both the new Zendesk and the old Zendesk, the steps should be pretty simple:

Go to the User Profile for the Requester

Find the Organization Field to edit

Start typing in the dropdown to select an Organization

Please feel free to review the screenshots at the end of this doc if you need some tips on how to do this.

Tips on Open & Pending Setting Ticket Fields

In general, this is can be set based on what the content of the question is. Some ideas though:

Administrator - Anyone who sounds like an admin or has [crpusd] (not a specific school) for their organization asking a question can probably be set as Urgent / In Progress.

Scheduling Questions / Non-Support Issues - Many questions that come into support might not sound like support issues at all. Please do not reply and simply set the Assignee to Anna to review

Parent / Student - While tickets from these users are fairly uncommon, when they come through, they’re often TSE-type issues, so feel free to set accordingly

Solved Chats

If the chat looks solved, just be sure to set the Organization and set as Ready for QA. Please change the Assignee to Anna

Resources

There are a bunch of resources available for tips on how to handle district tickets, if you would like to answer someone’s question in your reply email - and we’re working on building up a library of ideas every day! Some current suggestions are as follows: